This article was originally posted as a Twitter thread as a part of my Crash Course series.
🖥 📸 Speed up your workflow with these MacOS screen capture shortcuts, tips and tricks
Crash Course #3
1. The classic: Capture the entire screen.
If you have multiple screens, it will also include those. Images are saved to the Desktop by default.
2. Capture a selection.
This mode allows you to draw out a selection that you want captured. Simply click, drag your cursor to the desired height/width and release to capture. Hit ‘esc’ to cancel.
3. Move your selection.
While in selection mode, before releasing your mouse to capture, hold Spacebar and drag around. You can readjust your selection — let go of Spacebar to set it in place again.
4. Scale your selection in one direction.
While in selection mode, before releasing your mouse to capture, if you hold Shift, you’ll be able to snap which direction your selection will scale in.
5. Scale your selection uniformly.
Again, while in selection mode, hold Option (⌥) and you will start transforming your selection from the centre — similar to most design tools.
6. Capture an app window.
While in the selection mode, hit Spacebar and you’ll be able to click on any window to easily capture it in its entirety. By default, the exported image will have a shadow around the window.
7. Capture an app window WITHOUT shadow.
When you’re in the window selection mode, hold Option (⌥) and then click. This will save the captured image without a shadow.
8. Capture a selection to the clipboard.
Hands down the best trick out there 🙃 Copy your selection to the clipboard, then just paste the image to where you need (like design tools). This can be used with capturing app windows too.
9. Capture modes + settings.
This will let you switch between the previous modes, or even record a video instead of capturing an image.
10. Disabling the floating thumbnail.
Not only is this super annoying, but it delays saving your image for a few seconds (Personal preference 😅).
There are also some other useful settings here.
11. Capture full Touchbar.
This will capture whatever your Touchbar looks like and save it to your desktop.
12. Change screenshot file format
Choose between these options: png, bmp, gif, jpg, pdf, tiff). Put this in to Terminal and change away:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type -string “png”
13. Disable the screenshot shadows.
Just drop this in to Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
Change “true” to “false” to reset.
14. Change the saving location of your screenshots.
Drop this snippet in to Terminal and alter the path :
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location -string /Users/${HOME}/Desktop/
Alternatively, you can do this in the UI with “⌘ + shift + 5”, and diving into the Options.
Thanks for listening!
If you know of any other tips + tricks that I’ve missed, then reply below to help others 🤜 or jump over to Twitter and follow along.
